The latest entry in Odd Little Search Engines That Might…Sootle. Please, let me know if you want me to stop pointing you to this stuff. This engine is in deep Alpha, which might explain its name, logo, and terrible results (30 results for George Bush…) but not the lack of grammatical coherence in its “about” section…Given that the name of the Financial Director is “Peter Fiasco”, I’m beginning to wonder if these new sites aren’t elaborate jokes tossed up late at night by overworked engineers at Yahoo or Google….I mean….Sootle?
UPDATE: Within 12 hours of my posting this, both Peter Fiasco (my apologies, he’s apparently a real guy) and the founder of Sootle, Sid Yadav, emailed me. They were quite kind, pointing out that my criticism of the site would inspire them to greater things with their new creation. Sid points out that my Bush search in fact found 30 *clusters*, and a total of 313 results. His index is only 11 days old, and is only starting to crawl …literally. He calls Sootle “a hobby sort of project” and is working on a new logo and interface. Stay tuned….
It’s only funny until they get VC funding. Then it’s hillarious. 🙂
I’m smiling, but that is because I admire Sootle’s spunk, even though I don’t care for the marketing hype. Here you have a new search engine with some dedicated guys with a sense of humor and purpose who seem to have a plan and goal for doing something(?) with some substance beyond making some fast bucks… Sootle? Google? Not my first choice of names, yet who really cares if the thing works?
I’m impressed for two reasons at this point:
1) They explain something about the technology behind what they are doing. I’m not a search engine geek, but I wish I was… I love hearing about this stuff and what people are doing. Just having a robot or crawler is no small undertaking when you consider storage, bandwidth, and people getting upset with the idea of having crawlers on their web pages….
2) The site is not PLASTERED with advertising. I’m sure they will have some after they move out of beta, but I don’t get the feeling they will take any changes on soiling what they are building with greed.
To me, this is one to watch and a very exciting change from all the new sites that don’t crawl and come from a script that someone purchased. Heck, even I have one of those…!
Thanks,
Chris Nielsen
Nielsen Technical Services
What a JOKE! Their about section seems to imply they wrote the code but they are using PHPdig. Maybe they changed some MINOR aspects of the PHPdig code, but the majority of the code was NOT written by them! It looks like they even ask for code help from PHPdig.net under the name sid. GEEZ! Nothing like giving credit where credit is due.
Cool stuff. These guys have big -alls.
Do a search for something gambling related and it sticks up a casino – you know – the ones who like to send streakers all over the bloody place.
Not anything like near a search engine. In fact quite an odd little thing indeed.